Calvin News

Gail Landheer Zandee, a professor at Calvin College, will be honored this week with a Michigan Campus Compact (MCC) Faculty/Staff Community Service-Learning Award.
The award is the highest given by MCC to college and university faculty and staff in the state of Michigan.
Since 2001, Zandee has worked as a community partnership development coordinator for the nursing department at Calvin. In that work she is largely responsible for Calvin's three-neighborhood focus that sees the school's nursing students intimately involved in work in the Baxter, Burton Heights and Creston neighborhoods. 
The MCC award notes that throughout her career, Zandee has continually worked to integrate nursing pedagogy with community involvement.
Calvin's Jeff Bouman, director of the Service-Learning Center at the college and the person who nominated Zandee for the award agrees.
"Gail has been able to introduce nursing students to neighborhood nursing and community nursing, through the newly designed nursing curriculum," he said. "She has our nursing students in these communities in partnership with the community health workers, individual families and health clinics. With her colleagues in nursing she has led their department's charge in becoming one of the most civically engaged departments at Calvin."
Calvin president Gaylen Byker said Zandee's work in connecting students to community health workers has been exemplary.
"Suggested by residents and developed with the educational needs of nursing majors in mind," he said, "this program pairs lay community health workers with senior nursing students as they go door-to-door to deliver health education and consultation in these neighborhoods. This innovative program is a model of service-learning at its best."
Zandee will be formally honored during the 2008 Institute: Service-Learning and Community Service Awards Ceremony and Dinner, to held at the Bovee University Center on the campus of Central Michigan University on Thursday, February 7, 2008.
Michigan Campus Compact is a coalition of college and university presidents who are "committed to fulfilling the public purpose of higher education."